A topnotch WordPress.com site

Numbers Words Prejudice

Which is better Numbers and Scientific Proof, or Wordy Poetic Conjecture? Words have the edge in a 90% numbers phobic society. I love math. I discovered that some peace studies programs that had learned to work with the business department were flourishing while hostility between peace studies and business caused long established programs to suffer. What kind of peace program can’t get along with their neighbors?

The number one peace studies program had a smooth relationship with the business department and was number one in economics coverage. Peace studies program directors with philosophy degrees were in the lower twenty percentile of programs’ economics coverage. I was recently called arrogant by a philosophy doctorate who writes against anarchists. Many businesspeople and economists identify with anarchists.

Salem, Oregon peace community has an annual socialists versus anarchists baseball game. An anarchist peace editor gave me a chance with a monthly column on “Peace Economics” for eight years in a peace newsletter with 10,000 circulation. I gave that up to create a University of the Air class for Radio for Peace International.

A history degree requires no math. A historian became a featured speaker and I was systematically excluded from speaking by his cronies in the post 9-11 peace movement. In my thirteen years of Eugene politics, I was always respected for my speaking ability. With the return to my hometown in 1993, I became a “prophet without honor in my own home town” until my current run of weekly radio commentaries.

In engineering school it was common knowledge that many who could not handle such rigorous science and math would drop out and become accountants instead. My brother was one such case. My father, a lifetime Certified Public Accountant described how many of his classmates who failed a crucial class would go on to become economists. So when I made four honor societies earning my electrical engineering degree from the third ranked such program in the country, I was not third string like the economists. When I took statistics for engineers one summer and dropped into statistics for businessmen classes after about a month, I discovered that we engineers were about twice as far along learning statistics for the same credit hours.

The saying “lies, damn lies and statistics” is usually just a word person’s way of discriminating against number people.